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Design007-July2021

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40 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2021 company to develop RTL code to write the program for the FPGAs. at's all included within the design phase itself. Traditionally, in this model in the market, c u s t o m e r s a p p r o a c h you with some in-house resources, and they go to multiple companies to help them with differ- ent aspects of this. Very few companies have all this insight internally. Tier ones, yes, but they are modeling around 70% workload to be handled internally, with 30% peaks and valleys through outsourcing. Mid-sized and onward companies would go out to somebody for some aspects of this. And then comes the part where they are handing off to a board layout shop, and that board layout shop might be a manufacturing company that has board layout capability internally, or they may work with somebody outside like a manufacturing house to build their prototypes. en once the prototypes are done, the cus- tomer's engineers bring the board to the lab or the system and they start debugging, import their soware on it, and start bringing it up. When they have issues with the board, they go back to the manufacturing house and say, "Can you rework this part or that part? We need to replace these values of resistance and caps. e disconnector is screwed up, we need to reverse the planarity on these or pin up on this." is is normal when they're doing the debug. Also during the debug is a combination of hardware, firmware, and soware resources together during the bring-up of the board, when the customer launches their soware on it. It becomes a collaborative effort. We saw all that, and we see multiple handoffs. Number one, the one hand does not necessarily talk to the other and the customer becomes a trans- lator between these. Number two, when there is a hiccup in one area, it's a linear hit on the schedule because the customer is in the mid- dle. e customer feels a schedule delay. e fab shop is going to say, "You gave me the Ger- ber on this day, and it's a three-day turn. My day one starts today, not two days ago when you're supposed to give me the Gerber." Or, "By the way, my line is busy now, I'm on to something else." ings like that. Also, there's the material coordination. Between design house, the mechanical design house, and the prototype manufacturer, and the customer in the middle of it, the BOM is constantly evolving. ere are changes in the BOM. It becomes the customers' responsibil- ity, or if it's le to the design hub to coordinate directly with the manufacturing shop; there are a lot of things that fall to them there. Especially with the given market, the horrendously long lead time on components, and in any market that we have built for, there are always parts that have long lead times. Right now, it's just a very crazy time, because everything becomes a lead time. Knowing all of this, we said, "What are we going to be for the customer?" If we're just another manufacturing shop, yes, there's plenty of them around. If you're another design group, yes, there are a few good ones around. If you're a good layout shop, yes, there are a few good ones around or some manufac- turing shops that have good layout capability. What's our value to the customer? So that is how we designed and set up from day one, and we've been growing around that mindset. Our DNA is built around that we are the customer's extension of their design team, their ops team, and their manufacturing shop. We allow inte- gration of all of those under one roof, and we truly are our customers' extension. ey pick and choose what level of services, so our customers say, "You claim you do a lot of things. What is really your value-add?" Our answer is that our true value-add is the true integration of all of these, in-house, with our own internal resources. We give you the capa- bility to engage us very early on, spec-level definition, to helping you launch a production- Muhammad Irfan

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